‘It wasn’t long before…': Job only allowed employees to ‘clock in’ by calling on the office phone, employees retaliate by leaving 90-second voicemails every time

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Elna McHilderson • Managing Editor
Sep 30, 2025 4:00 AM EDT

If you think workplace culture is bad now, imagine the early aughts! Y2k was freaking everyone out, technology was advancing rapidly, and boom ego was still at an all time high, and they were the ones still running things! Times were tough and they keep on changing. 

 

Here we have some Gen-Xers working during the turn of the century. As hourly workers, they had to clock in and out every day, which is normal. But for this company, their entitled boss decided they all had to call her to clock in, with the one phone in the office… A landline that they all had to take turns using. Which meant, if you were the last one to use the phone, it didn't matter if you were on time or not, you're now late because you were last in line. Did the boss care about this? Nope. So the coworkers decided to team up to make this boss' voicemail the most annoying place. 

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    via Unsplash+ (and Berkeley Communications)

    Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

  • After days of 90-second voicemails with just rambling BS in them, she changed it to much easier system. One that gives more trust in the employees too! 

  • "Oh, you want us to call you when we get into the office?"

    I'm not even sure this belongs here but I couldn't find a Trolling Compliance subreddit so here we go.
    via ElGalloAzucarado
  • I was a contractor on a Y2K project (seriously) that was nearing its end. There were 4 techs (out of about 25) still working the project but we didn't have much to do.
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  • For the previous month or so we would have like one delivery to do per day (It was March 2000 or so) but otherwise we just hung out in our tiny office and played Duke Nukem.
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  • We were on a normal 8-5, M-F schedule but since there was very little work to do nobody was very conscientious about getting to work on time.
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  • We didn't have a punch clock or anything like that, just basically filled out a spreadsheet each week of how many hours we worked (Always 40, even if it was, say 38).
    via ElGalloAzucarado
  • We got a new manager who worked in a totally different city from us. She never explained why the change in policy but she called us all over to her office and let us know that we were supposed to call her each morning when we arrived to let her know that we are "clocking in" for the day.
    via ElGalloAzucarado
  • Sounds tedious but sure. One thing I don't think she realized is that our office only had one phone and when we tried to call her to "clock in" the final person to make the call always ended up leaving a voicemail for her after 8am.
    via ElGalloAzucarado
  • They were there on time but everybody needing to use the same phone right at the same time made it so they weren't able to call in on time.
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  • I forgot to mention that the person wanting us to call her to let her know we were in the office NEVER EVER showed up in hers at 8am so we were always forced to leave voicemails.
    via ElGalloAzucarado
  • tarifa al público rack rate habitación estandar studio suite $2,30 $2,97 master suite $3,420
    via Unsplash+ (and Getty Images)

    Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

  • At our team meeting at the end of the first week she called us out on "being late" with our VMs.
    via ElGalloAzucarado
  • We explained to her why she was getting the voicemails after 8 but her response was basically "This is YOUR problem, not mine.
    via ElGalloAzucarado
  • You're supposed to clock in on time". She did offer a solution that if the four of us were there only one call was necessary and we could just all say "Hello" on the VM.
    via ElGalloAzucarado
  • The next week we decided that we would make the voicemails as long as humanly possible (I think we had 90 seconds to record) just to troll her.
    via ElGalloAzucarado
  • One of mine went something like "In Van Halen's 'Hot for Teacher" video David Lee Roth is quoted as saying "I don't feel tardy" and I'd say that pretty much sums up my attitude today.
    via ElGalloAzucarado
  • Because not only do I not feel tardy I am, in fact, not tardy...... II For 90 seconds this would go on.
    via ElGalloAzucarado
  • We'd try to time it so that right at the very end of the voicemail we'd all say "Hello, we're clocking in", hopefully making her listen to 90 seconds of inane sh just to get to us clocking in.
    via ElGalloAzucarado
  • It wasn't long before we just put our hours in on the spreadsheet like before.
    via ElGalloAzucarado

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management salary boss employee hourly manager job work coworkers upper management co-workers employees what goes around comes around entitled people karma pay back career supervisor justice served workplace company business karma
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